Munich Personal RePEc Archive
A Portrait of Diversity In Indonesian Traditional Cuisine
Situngkir, Hokky and Maulana, Ardian and M. Dahlan, Rolan
Dept. Computational Sociology, Bandung Fe Institute
10 November 2015
Online at https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/68385/ MPRA Paper No. 68385, posted 16 Dec 2015 15:55 UTC A Portrait of Diversity In Indonesian Traditional Cuisine
Hokky Situngkir Ardian Maulana Rolan M. Dahlan ([email protected]) ([email protected]) ([email protected]) Dept. Computational Sociology Dept. Computational Sociology Dept. Evolutionary Economics Bandung Fe Institute Bandung Fe Institute Bandung Fe Institute
Abstract The archipelagic geography and demography of Indonesian people due to the way people serve food and drinks on the table is analyzed. Statistically some properties about the food recipes are observed, while the analysis is followed by the methodology to see the clustering of the food and beverage due to their ingredients. The global mapping of all the food yields four classes of the food that is related to the way people conventionally prepare the cuisines, whether the recipes are on vegetables, fish and seafood, chicken and poultry, and meats. It is obvious that ingredient wise, the diversity of the food is emerged from traditional ways adding spices and herbs. For more insights, the analysis for food dressings and traditional drinks are also delivered. While the mappings exhibit the classes of food and beverages based on the purposes and styles of the service in the cuisines, some signatures of regional localities are also detected.
Keywords: food, culinary, diversities, clustered map, memetics, phylomemetic tree, hierarchical clustered tree.
2015‐12‐16 1 1. Introduction The way people prepare their daily cuisines are probably one of the most important direct interaction between things related to culture and nature [14]. Half of the issue about food is about culture and the other half is about, environment and about maintaining life. The diversity of food with all the respective ingredients is culturally diverse all over the world. The history of how people consume food is rooted culturally and biologically [15].
Socially, food has also played a major role. Many analyses have drawn relation of food with those of social life as formed by habit, traditions, causal daily life [6]. Social interaction may change the way people preparing meals and drinks, from the processes of cultural assimilations, to the economic processes due to industrial and global life [1]. Every community has their own unique way to serve their meal, and it may give signature of the way people living specifically. Mapping the traditional food can reflect the landscape of the ethnography [24].
The similar course can be seen in Indonesian archipelago. The diverse ethnic groups in Indonesia also exhibits the large variations of cuisines across the country. Indonesia is located in the tropical zone of earth where ethnic groups are spreading within thousands of islands. The tropical climates have given access to various herbs and spices that have been used as ingredients for food and drinks [5]. Thus, the variations of food and drinks across the archipelago are also related to the different kinds of spice plants there are locally. Studying the diversity of food potentially brings us to more insights on anthropological understanding of the social complexity [23].
Today, the traditional foods and drinks are even further for the industrial and consumer exploitations. Traditional cuisines are now even delivered as processed food by the industry [12]. Exoticism of traditional foods, be it related to the unique taste and also its promise for the savor and healthy merits [3]. Even further, the industrializations of the traditional foods and drinks have become a kind of diplomacy based on the values and virtues of food, named as “gastro‐diplomacy” by some asian countries with campaigns include the mysticism, exoticism, naturalness, and healthiness of the food [25].
The paper reports the studies on thousands of traditional food and drinks recipes throughout the countries in order to have a visual mapping of the diverse ethnography in Indonesia due to the diversity of their respective unique cuisines. The initiatives to collect the data of Indonesian cultural heritages via online in http://www.budaya-indonesia.org/ have revealed more thousands of data from traditional culinary receipts from all over the country on line [20]. This has delivered opportunity to analyze the data of Indonesian traditional food of the existing diversities [21].
2. Meme in the tip of the Tongue The study of the food and beverages diversity in the archipelago has directly or indirectly relation to the diversity of ethnic groups and communities within. By looking cuisines in this way, the study of traditional food in Indonesia should not be seen exclusively separated with the meanings of them to the actual life of the people. Food and beverages are not merely about consumption but many aspects in which they are prepared [8]. Traditionally, particular food and beverages have implicit meanings, related to the health maintaining, prevent disease, and behaviors during times of food scarcity and abundance [10].
On the other hand, when it comes to the local and ethnic way of living, food and beverages have become a sort of social identity within people [cf. 9]. In Indonesia, it is common to name some sort of food with the places or ethnic groups from which it is originated, e.g.: “Sate Padang” (satay from Western Sumatera), “Tahu Sumedang” (fried tofu from West Java). Each ethnic group has unique
2 mixtures of ingredients on served food. Even further, the cooking recipes are passed from generation to generation and becoming the part of collective knowledge of local people [cf. 13]. Food and beverages in traditional culture have been an integrated element of culture and can be seen as a reflection of a sort of “art of living” [17]. Thus, food and beverages can be linked to the collective knowledge and memories among people in communities, be it ethnographic or geographic wise. The recipes of ingredients mix are information passes by generations as cultural heritage.
Collective information passes from generation to generation has been evolved in many ways into the kinds of foods and beverages as delivered to day within the ethnic social group and the society in the Indonesian archipelago. What people perceive as taste of the good food is actually an emerged properties of the mixtures of ingredients and various materials expressed in recipes. By having the hypotheses that the emerging tastes of food are coming from the mix and combination of the ingredients, every food can be written as the representation of the elements used making it.
Say is the finite set of all possible elements of food from which food and beverages can be served, and is a particular ‐th element from all possible food elements. Thus a specific food is the binary set of “ ” and “ ” denoting whether or not the element is used as ingredient in preparing it. Consequently, the length of all food representati ∈ on in our library is , where, ∈ 1 0 (1) 1, the is used in food which can now be simply represented as, 0, otherwise
(2)